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Profile Information

Since 2006, I've been working to help companies grow their online business by connecting with users online. I believe in data-driven decision making. I believe that online marketers should be marketers, not hackers. I believe in using a variety of tactics to create digital marketing campaigns that delight and deliver.

Full Name

Ruth Burr Reedy

Display Name

RuthBurrReedy

Job Title

Director of Strategy

Company

UpBuild, LLC

Location

Oklahoma, OK

Favorite Thing About SEO

I love that moment when you're looking at a website and you notice something really JACKED UP, and the whole site cracks open for you and you know exactly how you can help this business make more money.

Additional Contact Info

http://www.upbuild.io/contact/

Favorite Topics

Advanced SEO, Analytics, Content, Marketing Industry, On-page SEO

Blog Comments & Posts

When SB Nation published a controversial story on a sensitive topic, there was a huge public outcry. The subsequent peer review outlined key issues that will sound scarily familiar to many in the tech industry. Ruth Burr Reedy shares the most important takeaways to help fortify your own internal processes against big failures.

A relationship-based approach to link building can be so powerful. By connecting with site owners on a personal level, you can start creating a positive association between you and the content you share. Start thinking of a link as something that's given online by a real live person who also exists outside the internet, and you can move from being a link builder to being a relationship builder. Plus, you might make a friend.

Hiring SEOs is hard, but training them and helping them develop as professionals is even harder. A solid professional development plan increases employee retention and happiness, and makes it easier to have conversations about raises and promotion. Here's the model we've developed to help digital marketers of all stripes grow in their roles.

Think everyone knows as much as you do about SEO? Think again. Find out what the average client really knows and what happens when you don't make sharing your SEO knowledge a part of your standard business practice.

Here at Moz, our organic traffic has already been at over 50% (not provided) for over a year, and our (not provided) numbers have been hovering around 80% for a while now, so I’ve had some time to mull this over: In a post-keyword world, what is SEO?

Last week, I held a Mozinar talking about the SEO steps involved in transitioning from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com, and sharing some of the results we got. We got some great questions on the Mozinar, and I wanted a chance to answer some more of them as well as expand on some points that didn’t fit into the Mozinar.

As inbound marketing continues to gain traction, it's time to start building your keywords into the bones of your site, rather than adding them once your site is already completely mapped out. Our Lead SEO, Ruth Burr, talks about using keywords to drive personas and, ultimately, your site mapping process.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed that I live-tweet the conferences I go to. Extensively. Some people love it, some people hate it - but if you want to start live-tweeting for yourself, here are some things to keep in mind.

Attribution modeling is a hot topic in the SEO industry, but many of us aren't doing it as well as we want to be. Take a look at how you're approaching attribution modeling, and see why marketing analytics may be the solution you've been looking for.

"Panda" has become kind of a dirty word among SEOs. Tweet about a trip to the zoo or a cuddly stuffed animal and you're bound to get a tweet back saying, "Ugh, don't say panda, I'm still traumatized." My response to this reaction is twofold: I still love pandas. And I love Google Panda, too.

Link building outreach can be unpleasant, but through social media, people have the opportunity to form real relationships to help out with the task of getting your website and content out there. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr shares her tips on finding link targets online and building relationships with them through Twitter.

SEOmoz has been experiencing an interesting pattern in our branded organic traffic over the last few months. Is interest in our brand declining, or is a different culprit to blame? Ruth Burr digs into the data to find out.

We're excited to announce the new SEOmoz YouTube channel! Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/moz. We've added a bunch of our video content from the last couple of years, including Whiteboard Friday and our just-for-fun videos like Aaron's First Day.

Hi everybody! My name is Ruth Burr and I’m the new Lead SEO here at SEOmoz. I'm super excited to be here! I'll be posting on SEO here regularly going forward, but for my first post I wanted to tell you guys that when it comes to SEO, this is how I roll:

I've definitely seen this happen - when sprints are planned out for months in the future, it can make it difficult to get urgent changes made, or pivot quickly. I really advocate for businesses to figure this out when they are still small, because it's so much harder to make changes once you get too big.

I do think in this case SB Nation was right to take the piece down - it was up for only a few hours, and it was highly offensive and not a good representation of their brand. It would have been a bad idea to take it down without saying anything, and pretend it didn't happen, but I think they handled it as well as they could have after the piece launched. I do agree that older content shouldn't be taken down just because it becomes outdated or inaccurate, but instead should be updated, but in this case the piece was so damaging and had been up for such a short period of time, I think they were right to take it down.

Thanks Patrick, these are both fantastic additions. Clear instructions and deadlines are such a commonly-overlooked thing - too often you don't realize you haven't been clear until the final product isn't what you needed. Definitely agree about web projects as well; we all need to be better about figuring out how much time something will really take, not how long we wish it would take or how long it would take with no setbacks or unexpected developments.

That is definitely a challenge for many SEOs - we need to be able to effect change in so many different areas in order to really get results! As I often say, "SEO can't fix your business model" and I've totally been in situations where I've changed everything I could and have to move on.

With a business like a dentist, you're going to see a lot of competition for the bottom-of-funnel keywords like "dentist [location]". Defining your brand earlier and building it in your local community through content marketing and even through more traditional forms of advertising will help people decide whether or not you're the right dentist for them. Think about how your business is different from other dentists - are you hip? laid-back? kid-friendly? cutting-edge? - and work that in to your website and marketing. Any business with a brick-and-mortar location needs to make sure their brand is heavily reflected in what it's like to actually be there.

Ronell wrote a great post a while back on creating content for "boring" industries that you might want to check out: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-content-for-boring-industries

A brand new baby brand needs to work even harder to build the signals I've outlined above. With a new business, often digital marketing efforts fail because the brand hasn't taken the time to really define itself. It's important to have your brand values and strategy in place (as well as a strong business model) when you go to market, so you can start reaching your target audience most effectively. I find that a lot of new businesses are so focused on starting to make money - any money - right away that they don't spend the time and effort to do these things, which just makes it harder for them to market their business and make money long-term.

I agree with you that it's difficult to build a brand without digital marketing. That said, I absolutely believe that you need to have a plan in place for your brand ahead of time in order to get the most out of digital marketing. Otherwise, you can end up in a situation where your different marketing channels aren't working together and delivering the best possible brand message.

In your example of Amazon.com - I still don't think Google has an actual algorithmic factor that says "this site is Amazon, and people love it, so we will rank it above other websites." Instead, it's important to think about both why people want to go to Amazon, and what signals Google could look at to determine that in an automated, scalable way. So this could be things like inbound links (which Amazon has just an enormous amount of), click-through rate from search, the co-occurrence you mention above (people searching a brand alongside a keyword), etc. These are the signals we can try to build by building our brand, and to your point with Amazon, if you get enough of those "people really love this website" signals, Google may count them as even more important than on-page SEO factors.

Branded traffic does have the highest conversion rate if you're using last-touch attribution - but that just means that the work you did to build your brand isn't getting credit! This is one reason why marketers may want to change their attribution models to incorporate some earlier touches in the customer journey, to track how well their brand-building efforts are going.

Hooray! Honestly, I think that the willingness to put in the hard work and undertake a project that may take months to really see results is part of what separates great marketers from the pack. It can be daunting to start, but the up-front work it takes to build a brand will actually mean less work down the road, because your brand will start attracting an audience that will link and engage without your having to prompt them to do so.

Brand marketing can be a great way to rank for relevant keyword phrases. I don't think it's a matter of choosing one or the other - you should be researching the keyword phrases your target audience uses, so you can talk to them in the language they use to search. That's what keyword research is all about, and brand research and brand marketing can help you achieve that goal.

Thanks for your comment! I was a big part of the SEOmoz -> Moz migration and was really pleased with how well it went. I do agree with Rand that "Brand" most likely is not a ranking input in the way that something like keyword use or link juice is - instead, it's that a quality brand attracts other ranking inputs, like links, shares, engagement, co-occurrence, etc. Basically, all the things that Google looks for in an Expert, Authoritative, Trustworthy site are things brands naturally accrue through solid brand marketing. Thanks for reading!

I totally agree, Nick! It was a big revelation for us as an agency; we were trying to optimize sites for clients who hadn't taken the time to really define their brand, and it made it so much harder to zero in on audiences and keywords to target!

Thanks everyone for your comments on this post - I love the lively discussions this community fosters!

When making this video, I was attempting to make a pretty complex technical issue with a lot of pros and cons into a more bite-sized, digestible video, with the result that I omitted some important considerations and spent more time than necessary on others. I do feel that I over-emphasized scraper risk, which a.) will be a risk no matter what and b.) often doesn't present too much of an issue for most sites.

I'm not a developer, and I appreciate those of you with web dev experience weighing in on the post. This is an issue that is often cause for debate between SEOs and web developers, and one thing that I neglected to say in the video (that I always say to my clients in real life) is that every website is different, there are many very good reasons to NOT do it the way I said to, and that you should have a careful and considered conversation with your developer over whether the cost to implement and maintain this structure is going to be worth the added SEO benefit. I have absolutely seen serious SEO benefits to eliminating duplicate content and pointing search engines and browsers to exactly the URLs that you want them to crawl and index - but I'm also not the one who has to make these changes or deal with the other development headaches they can cause, and I should have approached that topic with more empathy.

It's awesome to see the amount of technical prowess in this community - it's really grown up a lot even in the last couple of years. I've learned a lot from this thread about ways to make these change requests easier on my and my clients' dev teams, and that will help me continue my lifetime of learning more about SEO. I hope everyone in the Moz community knows that with this blog, the original poster often learns as much from the comment thread as readers do.

With trailing slashes, as with the other examples above, I think it matters most that one version resolves to the other, rather than which one you use. I know a lot of web devs prefer to use the trailing slash, so that's what I would lean for, but I haven't seen much SEO benefit specifically from using one over the other.

"Plan ahead and start correct" aren't luxuries that all website owners or SEOs have. It's very easy for people who know their stuff to scoff and say that of COURSE you should know that www and non-www are two different pages, but I see websites that are built with both resolving every day. I think there's room to be creating content for people who don't know as much about these things as we do.

As for relative vs. absolute URLs, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree - from my perspective, pointing search engines to exactly the place you'd like them to go with as few redirects as possible is worth doing and worth the extra time and effort it takes to code correctly. Your recommendation of "do it right and do it relative" only works if the "do it right" scenario is in place, which assumes that you were there when the site was built. Coding absolute URLs creates more headaches on the dev side but increases crawl efficiency on the SEO side - so every company is going to have to weigh those two priorities when implementing this change.

It's unusual that you'd see a huge ranking boost from just this one change - SEO changes are often cumulative in nature. The first step is making sure your site is as easy as possible for Google to crawl, index and rank - eliminating duplicate content is a great first step toward that. The next step is continuing to optimize and build content, links and authority in your niche. Good luck!

Depending on how they're set up, WP sites can definitely be prone to all of these errors. Make sure you're checking that www, non-www, http and https versions of the site are all resolving. If relative links are being automatically created for e.g. nav items, you can usually change that in your settings.

I agree, David - especially with your point about not passing internal links through redirects whenever possible. They're the only links you have full control over so why wouldn't you want to make them as clean and direct as possible?

I think it's always a good idea to, whenever possible: 1.) Present Google with exactly the URL you want them to crawl/index, and 2.) eliminate or drastically reduce any and all times a user or search engine has to pass through a redirect.

Totally agree, Richard - a determined scraper can bypass all of these things easily, but it can help against fully-automated scrapers that don't take the time to update content but just slap it up as-is.

It's true that the risks posed by scrapers are both fairly small and easily resolved by scrapers who actually know what they're doing. However, a small risk is not the same as no risk.

"Should" is very different from "is" - I still see https/http/www versions of websites not resolving to each other all the time. Just because it seems very basic to people who have been doing this for a while doesn't mean it's something that the entire rest of the web is thinking about at all. You say "the browser (including spiders) will default to what it is already using," but that's my point - from an SEO perspective we don't want that. We want one version of our website to be crawled and indexed. It's something that site owners should take control of for themselves rather than allowing Google to make the call.

It's hard for me to address your third point since you don't really elaborate, but in my ~10 years of SEO experience I've seen sites with large canonization and duplicate content problems get crawled less deeply and less frequently over time, and been able to increase the depth and frequency (not to mention the accuracy) of the crawl by addressing these duplicate content problems.

Lastly, the inbound link dilution of having four different versions of your website resolve can be a huge headache to fix. As I said in the video, often your dev team will not want to re-code your internal links from relative to absolute, and there are valid reasons for this, but from a site cleanliness and crawl cleanliness perspective it's worth fixing.

The other thing to keep in mind when using the "canonical redirect" you've mentioned above is that if you don't also update your internal links, you're forcing browsers and search engines to take the extra step of going through the redirect. It's just not as clean and can dilute the power of your internal links somewhat.

Oh! In the rows with the category names, we put an "o" in the box where they scored on that metric on their previous review, and an "x" in the box where they are now. We capture any action items in the row below, where the category descriptions are.

Crowdsourcing is a great idea! I've definitely found that people learn best by doing, as well. I usually tell people not to force a specialty; over time you'll figure out what you like and dislike, and usually that aligns pretty closely with what you're good at and not so good at.

When I was still at Moz, my manager Annette said something that really stuck with me: "I don't have a lot of patience for internal competition. If you want to be competitive, we have competitors." This is the message I try to give my team at BigWing. A rising tide raises all boats - the more we contribute to each other's knowledge, the more cool stuff we're all able to do.

Education is one of our company values and that goes for educating our team and educating our clients. Part of how we combat the "knowledge hoarding" you describe is by making teaching an explicit part of everyone's advancement plan - that way, if someone isn't contributing to the overall team's knowledge base it's something that we can discuss in their mid-year and annual reviews, because it's a very clear expectation we've laid out.

Internal jealousy can create a very toxic environment, so if we do see it happening it's something we try to nip in the bud through one-on-one coaching. In the long term, if someone's very invested in playing politics and tearing team members down/holding them back to make themselves look better, they're probably not going to last on our team. I think setting and enforcing clear expectations about these kinds of behavior is the best way to keep them from festering.

We do the same at BigWing - we have regular training/education sessions, and anyone who wants to can host one. Our content team also does a regular "Show and Tell" of the coolest things they've been working on lately.

It definitely varies from market to market. When you need an expert, sometimes a trainee won't do (especially if you don't already have someone on staff who can train them). In markets where there's more tech talent, a company can be more picky. If any of the younger marketers you know who are interested in learning more about SEO want to move to Oklahoma City, tell them to give me a call!

Have you looked in the Moz Q&A section? I'd be surprised if other people haven't already asked and answered this or similar questions about salary.

Salary is about more than number of hours worked, and one reason why web developers and designers tend to make high salaries is because finding a good web developer or web designer is even harder than finding a good SEO - employers have to offer competitive salaries to try to attract and keep their devs.

I don't lend a lot of credence to Alexa ranking - the best indicator of whether your search marketing is working is whether you're getting search traffic that converts. I recommend Distilled U for a course in SEO, and for advice on search marketing I recommend heading over to the Moz Q&A forum. Good luck!

When I'm negotiating salary I usually use PayScale to figure out what the combination of role, experience level, perks and location should mean in terms of salary expectations.

For someone with <1 year of SEO experience, I'd expect to be paying them an entry-level or close-to-entry-level salary for tech jobs in my market. After that it would really depend on what they can do. A lot of job descriptions ask for someone with, for example, 3 years of experience - but that doesn't mean they wouldn't hire someone with less experience than that if they felt that the person could do the job, so I often recommend that people go ahead and apply for jobs they feel they'd be qualified for even if they don't quite meet the years of experience requirement (the same goes for having a degree in a specific field, I know very few SEOs who actually have a degree in Marketing).

If you are going to apply for a job for which you have a relatively low level of experience, you'd better do a lot to demonstrate that you can do the job. That's why it's important to build your SEO portfolio. Keep track of the metrics and results you've been able to achieve on sites you've worked on, using numbers like % increase in organic traffic, conversions and sales. Consider building your own "side project" site, or taking on a friend's website for free or reduced cost, in order to have a site to test your stuff on and use as an example on job applications. Keep notes on what you did and what the results were. Showing that you know what to do and can get results is the best way to get a better job or negotiate a higher starting salary, even for an entry-level position.

Don't forget that in addition to paying you, a company that is hiring you in order to teach you SEO is also investing time and effort in helping you develop marketable skills. They will be taking that extra time and effort on their part into consideration when thinking about how much they can afford to pay you.

Wow, that 2-week course sounds intense, but what a great learning opportunity for your candidates! We hire one at a time, for a 90-day traineeship period. For that period they are hourly employees rather than salaried, but working full-time. The trainees spend a lot of time in independent study and apprentice with more experienced members of the team on larger projects; toward the end of the traineeship they may start getting their own small clients. At the end of that 90 days we sit down with them and talk about what they've learned. Usually at that point we have a pretty good idea of what they can do and whether they'll be a good fit, so the real purpose of that meeting is to talk to them about what they like and don't like about the role, and whether they see internet marketing as a career they'd be interested in - i.e. "are you sure this is what you want to do?"

I'm inclined to agree with Ruan, but agree it's a personal preference. I don't mind if potential employees have pics of themselves having a drink or two out and about - Leah has a good point that it speaks to their ability to manage their online presence, though, if they have too many public party photos.

I think we as SEOs also need to do a better job of educating our clients in the sales process. People want to increase their rank in the search engine because it's easy for them to understand - they google their favorite term, they see their website, and that feels good. It's up to us to teach clients about the real value of search marketing in terms of conversions, revenue, brand and connection with their audience.

I would definitely recommend completing some modules at Distilled U - it will give you some added experience and learning opportunities. If you can swing it, I'd also recommend attending a search marketing conference in your area; they're a great place to learn new stuff, and if you're planning on freelancing, conferences can be a great place to make connections with people who might need to contract out some SEO work. Good luck!

Thanks so much! I'm planning on putting together a second post that will talk more about training, but I definitely agree on having a dedicated person whose job it is to help train, answer questions, etc.

It may sound like science fiction, but we're having good results with it - I have two SEOs on my team right now who had no experience when we hired them and both are already seeing return on client campaigns.

I think most of us are self-taught or learned on the job - SEO's a hard thing to try to learn in school (I also have a liberal arts degree, so it's not like they were teaching SEO in my school anyway). I guess the challenge for us now is to become those great mentors and teachers that we were lucky enough to have along the way!

I think you can do either. The important thing is that you have an account with a personality and a conversational style. It's really hard to build relationships as a company, as opposed to as a person - so even if you're tweeting as a company, be a person.

I know that some colleges are starting to offer courses and certifications in internet marketing. Rather than focusing on SEO tactics, I'm hoping that they'll talk about marketing strategies on the internet - using data to build a brand, content strategy, UX, etc.

I've been doing SEO for almost 10 years and also feel like I'll never know everything about it! I heartily recommend learning about other marketing channels and techniques, as well - it gives you a much more holistic understanding of what you're trying to do. Happy learning!

Sharing credit is the best way to encourage your team to keep doing things in an SEO-friendly way, but don't sell yourself short - being accountable for the site's search performance is a big job and if you're doing it well that's no small potatoes.

It's absolutely possible to take some time off from the industry and come back and get caught up, in part because the fundamentals of SEO do still apply - relying on long-term marketing solutions instead of short-term tricks is the best way to get to take some leave every now and then. When it comes to the future/babies, I'm less concerned about losing touch while on leave and more concerned about the long hours I work once I return - but there are a ton of super-successful SEO moms and I look forward to being one someday.

That's definitely a big part of what we do with clients. A surprising number of businesses don't think to mention they are under a penalty (or don't even know that it happened), so we do a lot to figure out if there's bad SEO to clean up before we start talking about improvements and results. The other thing a lot of SEOs don't do well is set realistic expectations about what a site can and can't achieve with rankings and traffic.

I am a big fan of posting a sentence or two update at the top of the post saying something like "This post may contain outdated information - for the latest information go here" and link to a newer resource. For something like a post about an event, you can put an update at the top that says "Update: Thanks everyone for making the event a success! See you next time" or something similar. I agree that you don't have to completely rewrite everything or take it down entirely - as long as you make it clear that it's an old post that's often sufficient.

I think a lot of people/businesses can't do SEO themselves, because it's a pretty specialized skill that takes a lot of upkeep. I usually recommend that people hire someone who knows what they're doing to handle their SEO, whether that's an in-house employee or an agency - and if they're going to task someone with learning it they should give them the time and space they need to succeed.

I don't necessarily agree that certification is the way to go, although I have seen that degree and certificate programs in SEO are becoming more common at colleges and I support that. There are a lot of challenges and drawbacks in attempting to create a meaningful certification for SEOs. I think a better approach is to take the time to learn to do SEO well and ethically so you can say to your clients "I will make you money, and won't use high-risk tactics."

Thank you Ronell! It's hard when you love SEO and love SEOs, and know that someone's heart is in the right place but their tactics aren't (although blogging and editorial calendars can certainly be tactics in a larger strategy).

I mean obviously you don't work for me so I can't just be like "don't worry about it," but I would say staying current on industry news on sites like Moz and Search Engine Land should absolutely be part of an SEO's daily work tasks.

Google is showing authorship less than it used to. This doesn't mean authorship isn't working properly on your site, NECESSARILY - it might just mean that Google has decided that your articles won't display the snippet OR that the search result for the queries you're using won't show any author results at all. If you're not seeing authorship show up when you search for the full title of your blog post, that may be a clue that it's not working properly.

IF authorship is implemented correctly on your site AND Google has decided to show authorship in that SERP AND Google has decided your result is the one that should get authorship, the photo should show up. Once you've verified in the validator (which sometimes will give a false positive but will at least let you know if it's actively not working), the best way I've found is just to search (in an incognito window) for the titles of your blog posts. If authorship shows up for any of them you know it's implemented properly.

Google is not displaying pictures in results with authorship as much as they were a couple of months ago - so it may just be that they've opted not to show the snippets for those queries anymore, rather than a problem with your site.

First of all, I don't think all webpages should have authorship markup, or need to. Your product description pages, for example - usually those don't have any sort of byline. Who wrote them isn't relevant to the task of the page at hand, i.e. sell the product. So you wouldn't want an authorship snippet to show up instead of a review snippet or a product image snippet, and neither would Google.

Overall, I think we're already seeing what will happen - having markup on a page is not a guarantee that you'll see a rich result, it just means that you certainly won't get one without it. Search engines right now are in favor of web page owners marking up content as appropriate - I think full content markup can be a good thing in terms of classifying the web. Of course, if people abuse it (as they almost certainly will), search engines will have to take steps to circumvent that abuse.

In the end, it's important to remember that markup just says "here's what this piece of information is" (in this case, "here is the author's name") - showing search engines that it's of high quality will still come from other signals.

Don't forget that Google is showing authorship less now overall - so even with authorship implemented properly, you may not see it for every post. Having the "contributor to" section updated is a good test though.

I was pretty shocked too! At one point I was pulling my hair saying "if Dr. Pete, Matthew Brown, Rand and I can't figure this out between the four of us, what hope do small business owners have?" It's tricky for sure.

I suspect Gianluca is right - Google just isn't showing authorship as much as it used to. It might not even be that Google doesn't think your content is right for authorship - it may be that they've decided the queries that you were showing authorship for will no longer display authorship in that SERP.

There are different ways of being "great for SEO." It's important to note that having a long title tag probably won't impact your rankings either way - instead, it may impact your click-through rates from SERPs since Google may change or shorten the title tag to something your users find less appealing. While targeting long-tail keywords is certainly a valid SEO strategy, there are few keywords that are SO long that they would create a super-long title tag and still have enough value to be worth targeting. If you're seeing the results you want to see, that's great - I would just recommend keeping an eye on your title tags to see if they're being shortened, and if so, test longer title tags to see if you can raise click-through on those results.

Fortunately, for a local business owner it's not necessary to have a Wikipedia-like web presence. If you can't provide manicures to the entire country there's no need to rank nationwide for "nail salon." Local search marketing is becoming much more its own thing. A great first step is using tools like Moz' GetListed service, which helps local business owners lock down their local listings and make sure they're correct and consistent. From there, having a well-built site as I discussed above can give local business owners a huge leg up since many small business websites are...not great.

As Google et al become more sophisticated at discovering relationships between entities, they're also becoming much more sophisticated at discovering which queries have strong local intent. Since many local searches come from mobile, a small local business would also do well to have a good mobile experience.